The Truest Master
by bugland
Summary: Nine-year-old Severus Snape goes out at night to bury a body in the woods. Someone is watching... CHAPTER FOUR ADDED
1. Chapter One

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**The Truest Master**  
By: Bugland

**Part I:**

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He holds the wand as steadily as he can, guiding the shrouded bundle through a maze of saplings and scrub. "Acids and bases," he says aloud. For once unconcerned with the sound of his own voice, he sends the words ahead, a beacon and a warning, to let the boggarts and centaurs know he is a Man of Insight. He will trust in his night vision and considerable common sense. He will let the magic words guide him. It will be all right-

His wand hand wavers slightly.

Before he can correct the error, threadbare white linen snags on a twig. The tablecloth slides, exposing a bleached jade foot with rigid, tentacular toes. He lunges to catch it and finds himself poised uncomfortably between two extremes. He can't step forward, or the bundle will move with him. He can't step back or the shroud will fall.

The magic words have abandoned him. _My voice_, he thinks, _mine_, but still they won't obey.

A layer of cellophane-thin flesh covers the ribcage under his hand. Will it tear if he presses too hard? Will it slide like his makeshift shroud, opening the abdominal cavity and letting all manner of horrors loose? How quickly do house-elves' bodies decay? Holding his breath, he reaches to snatch up the hem, but even this slight movement sends everything bobbing merrily off again. The shroud slides further, and this time he can't stop it. Spindly hip, hand-arm-and-shoulder and a jutting, blood-streaked jaw-

He feels it all slip and turns away quickly, dropping his wand on the grass. A soft thud follows. The shroud collapses, like a parachute, against the backs of his legs.

_Boots_- his mind's voice, dreadfully childish. _Boots, these are my boots._ The contrast inverts suddenly into unearthly pallid mud and white leather. Black frost glazes the silver grass.

His uncles are right. He can't take it. He will indeed go mad.

"Acids," he hears himself whisper. Darkness is a Lethifold, creeping stealthily over his back. "Acids and bases."

He spits out the taste of bile and closes his eyes.

When he can open them again, the night has drifted a little lower. Glancing back toward the house (or citadel, rather, massive against the violet sky), he sees his footprints stamped clearly across the wet lawn. It makes him want to swear. They will see, of course; unless some brainstorm arrives before dawn, They will follow his solution and criticize it roundly.

_Circumspection, idiot boy!_ Grandfather roars inside his head. _Learn to cover your tracks!_

_So teach me the effing footprint spell._

He bends to retrieve his wand, eyeing the black ground dubiously. A practical digging charm would also help.

There's always the Demergus Curse. Even his pig-ignorant cousins can cast that one. Still, the way this evening's going, he'll probably find himself up to his neck in mud and centipedes until They return from Caernarvon, while every badger within miles zeroes in on the scent of his sweat.

"Acids and bases!" he says, quite loudly.

No. Demergus is out.

He clears his throat and tucks the wand into his pocket so he can gingerly flex both hands. Feels like glass in every joint. He tries to be grateful the botched Curse didn't kill him instead, but it's hard when no one else seems to think so either. _House elves don't grow on trees! You'll just have to stay behind and clear up this mess._ A nearby tree even looks like_ her,_ twisted, tall and pale, with roots like the scalloped hem of her dressing robe.

He wants to stomp his feet and scream (Bitch-witch! Go have another baby!), but instead snatches the wand from his pocket.

_"Mobilihumus!"_

The very earth rears up.

Yards thick, underside furred with living roots, it bucks him over onto his back. Shrubs stoically ride the wave. The smaller trees, their branches thrashing, tilt against the sky-

_"C-Cessacantio!"_

Everything drops with a massive _floomp,_ drenching him in mud.

Like a bug, he flips onto his stomach and crawls blindly away until grass tickles his palms. The sweetly herbal smell, so much cleaner than he is now, makes him want to cry like a little kid. _"Practice your Curses- living target- not on the carpet, idiot boy!"_ Someone will pay for this humiliation. Not his grandfather. Not his father- they're too powerful. Said pig-ignorant cousins, maybe. Will he ever make _them_ squirm.

_Inconcinnus. Serpensortia. Why? Because you're here!_

Still not crying, but gritting his teeth, he sits up to survey the damage.

The vegetation, rustling softly, seems to be in order. He still has his wand, but his hair and clothes are filthy, with dirt driven under his robes and the familiar grit of dirt in his teeth. Something glints pallidly in his peripheral vision. Hoping it's only the tablecloth, that the 'evidence' has been buried, he slowly turns his head to catch a whiter glimpse of bone.

_Acids and bases, remember._

They are magic words, deep magic, leaving no room for horror or guilt as he walks slowly over, looks for a moment upon the space where a head should have been (the withered lower palate, the voiceless stump of tongue), and drops the shroud to cover it. He'd burnt the head in his first panic, tossing it into the stove, but the rest of the body was too large; it would have taken hours and still probably left traces. Nonetheless, he begins to think a funeral pyre preferable to this ignominy of trees and twigs and mud, though it would have earnt him days in the cellar for casting Incendius unsupervised. Mother insisted on this rule after he immolated her wardrobe. Mother refused to believe Grandfather when he said the boy was still too young to control a blaze once started. Mother would have risen to new heights of paranoia had she been able to read his thoughts: _I could set a Fire Doll on you. I could kill you while you sleep._

They'll be apparating back shortly before dawn. He has yet to dispose of the body, clean the kitchen walls and floor, clear out the stove (how much remains of the house-elf's skull? Will he have to bury it too, or can he curse it into powder and cast it to the wind?), wash his clothes, take a bath, stow away his collection bottles and somehow remove those footprints- without leaving more footprints- without the footprint spell!

It isn't fair. He's so tired.

More than tired... He's Unutterably Weary.

He plops down again, right next to the shrouded corpse, and scratches at the earth with the tip of his wand. The slow way, then, by inches... or perhaps a banishing charm? Focusing on a patch of ground, he modifies the classic sweep and soil shoves neatly over, leaving a shallow groove.

"Aren't I creative," he said dully.

_Sweep_, rest. _Sweep_, rest. Dirt patters against a nearby yew. The moon rises on a scented breeze. It seems strangely particular, courting with light the dewy mud and clods, a late-budding twig- even the shroud, for pathos, he supposes- while he sits alone in a circle of stagnant darkness.

Just playing in the dirt, like any other child.

Part I **-=- **Part II **-=- **Part III

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	2. Chapter Two

She watches invisibly, waiting, as always, wondering if she has waited too long.

These masters are worse than the last ones. Serving them gnaws away at her heart and sense. The dreadful secrets she keeps, the conflicting orders she follows- and the curses, flung at her by children! Could this be enslavement at last, tightening about her like a noose? And if not, what is it?

Surely not loyalty. Surely not love.

As always following an injury or death, the other house-elves work in darkness, not daring to light a single candle. They bow, scrape, cringe and cry... and so does she, of course. She doesn't know what the others think; they never speak of it. She only knows she doesn't want to be a slave. She doesn't want to abandon her smallest and truest master to the Dark creatures he calls family.

Although he has cursed her in his turn, he is still only a child.

Quietly, as a servant should, she steps into the world.

It smells of a freshly dug ditch. The small, dark figure continues with his excavation. Sitting cross-legged just out of the moonlight, with his black head cocked to one side and the wand moving in steady rhythm (_sweep_- pause, _sweep_- pause), he looks like he might be playing, for once. After dark, in the bush (despite his terrible fear of centaurs), without another human for miles (though he might be better off without them)...

And digging a grave for a friend. Of course.

"Ahem," she says in her tiniest voice.

He turned quickly, pivoting on his knees and one hand. A scattered arc of darkness follows his wand toward her face. Hearing a sound like hail, she closes her eyes.

It stings like a hex. It tastes like... dirt.

She opens her eyes and sees at once she has waited too long. His face is masked, like the faces of the older masters who apparate out of locked rooms in the dead of night. _Oh, Lady and Lord, they're taking children now... _And she tastes ozone, like the air before a rising storm, heating blood and bone until it seems if she traced a finger across the sky, its glassy indifference should melt. 

These are not a house-elf's thoughts. Displacing horror, even grief, it feels almost like _will_-

"Sorry," he says, round-eyed, before it occurs to him he's apologizing to a house-elf.

She can see his eyes.

Not one of _those_ masks, after all. He's only very dirty. "Master Severus!" she says, her voice now seeming abnormally loud. "What has you been doing?"

He gives her one of his patented _looks_ and sits back, shoving the wand base-down into a clump of earth. "Digging a hole the hard way," he says with asperity.

"Let Mippy clean your face," she offers, stepping forward.

Another look- the considering one. Mud is caked in his eyebrows. Then he lowers his gaze and retrieves the wand, flipping it up into his palm with practiced grace. "I'm supposed to do it." And he turned away from her.

Like a good house-elf, she stands quietly and watches.

She worries about her Master Severus. She worries that his eyes are so old and he never plays, except with the crucibles and alembic an aunt gave him for his birthday. She worries that no one, himself included, seems to understand his sense of humor. She worries that he'd rather shatter all the windows than cry 'like a little kid'. She worries that his mother only seems to breathe easy these days when he is locked away. She worries about what his mother has become.

In the beginning, she'd been a mother.

In the beginning, she had been human...

_Sweep_- pause. _Sweep-_ pause.

His hair hangs limp, a ragged crow's wing across the nape of his neck. A couple of months ago, Mrs. Snape hacked off the queue he wore to emulate his father. He won't let anyone take care of it. He says it doesn't matter. And even knowing the Old Man's rules (_Constant Vigilance, Circumspection, Self-Reliance_), she worries that he won't let her clean the mud from his face.

The grave has become a perfect oval. "Skurry would like that," she says quietly. "Skurry liked things to be tidy."

His shoulders hunch, breath snagging on a moment of brittle silence. Then his lips start moving again. She realizes with a mild shock that he's been speaking all this time- just like his paranoid aunt, who comes downstairs to every meal muttering a countercurse. After a while, one simply doesn't notice.

"Acids and bases, just acids and bases. Acids and bases. Acids and bases..."

A shiver runs up her spine; she doesn't know whether to hug herself for comfort or slap her own stupid, servile face. She's heard it before, this unchildlike husk of a voice. _Waited far too long..._

"Master Severus?"

"Hm?" he says dreamily, not breaking the rhythm of his mantra.

"These words you is saying- what do they mean?"

He does seem pleased that she asked. One last sweep and he turns to face her, resting the wand's tip lightly on the fingers of his left hand, and faintly smiling. Not a child's smile, no; the smile of a priest about to unfold some terrible mystery.

"They're chemicals," he says. "The Muggles have special paper to test for them. I don't know why they bother," he adds contemptuously. "They're everywhere."

"Muggles?"

"Acids and bases," he says, too patiently. His eyes are opaque. "They're in me-" tapping the wand on his palm- "and in you." He points it at her. She can't help but flinch, and if he were himself, it would break his heart. "It's a theory I have- deep down, we're only chemicals. Acids and bases. That's why we can do magic, and why magic works on us."

She says nothing. There's nothing she can say.

"Of course," he adds, turning back to Skurry's grave, "It also means none of this is real."

"Skurry isn't really dead?"

He rocks forward slightly, tightening his mouth. "No," he snaps. "I is- _am_ saying that the... if this is all we are, then there is nothing. Nothing to worry about." The smile returns, malignantly serene. His rocking stops. "Nothing," he says, sounding rather like her former master under the Ministry's Veritaserum. "No thoughts. No feelings. Acids and bases."

He gestures, and the grave dug itself.

She sits beside him. She looks down into the deepening hole. She looks up into his young-old face. She sees, just beyond him, the rumpled tablecloth beneath which her friend Skurry lies dead.

(Who is your truest master, house-elf?)

The storm remains inside her. She just has to call it up.

"The shroud is a good idea," she says deliberately. "Skurry always liked to be decent."

His lips draw back in a grimace; she sees his teeth glisten wetly in the moonlight. A child's teeth, the incisors still serrated... Then he sucks in his breath, and the muttering starts again.

"Acids and bases. Acids and... and bases..."

"Mippy knows why Mr. Patriarch picked on Skurry today. Skurry was skiving off on his chores. He was getting on." She hears a minute clicking, like a handful of water-worn pebbles. It takes her a moment to realize its his teeth again, a muscle working in his narrow jaw, anticipating the texture of something he'd love to bite. "Maybe Master Severus did Skurry a favor. At least his way was quick."

His wand-hand jerks violently- _swish!_ Clumps of rooted earth fly like bludgers, punching holes in the undergrowth. And then he says, his voice a little higher than normal, "'Master Severus' made a mess of it."

"Made a mess of what?"

"The Curse. The Consuoris Curse..."

"Mippy isn't concerned with Curses," she answers, not quite truthfully.

There is a brief silence. It smells of rotting leaves, of earth... and, oddly enough, of lightning.

He turns abruptly to stare at her; his eyes, perfect chips of obsidian, reflect her small, pointed face. They aren't truly black. She knows this better than anyone, after eight years of questions, conflicts and nightmares. It is an illusion caused by darkness.

"I'm-sorry-he's-dead," he says, all in a rush.

She makes herself not move. He begins to rock again, fingers twisting around the wand. His mouth quivers and sets in a feral snarl. "Didn't you hear me, you stupid house-elf? I said I'm sorry he's dead!"

"He had a name," she whispers.

_"Skurry!"_ he shouts into her face. "Skurry is dead, he's dead, I k-k..." He hitches in breath. "I killed him! I killed him, and I'm sorry!"

The mantra has stopped.

Clumsily she scoots sideways and puts a hand on her master's shoulder. He jerks away from her. What she can see of his face is waxen.

"I really did kill him..."

"You didn't mean to," she says, very gently.

"They told me to curse him. They _told_ me to curse him." His gaze roves around the clearing, over the mound of earth and the white shroud eclipsed in shadow, finding nothing to focus on. The wand tilts laxly in his hands. "They... they made me do it. They made me do it. They made me do it. They made me do it." Are these the new magic words, then? She can almost see them, spilling like blood from his tongue.

In that moment, she doubts her newfound will.

He draws a deep, harsh breath. His eyes find hers. They are wide and full of light. His hands reach out to her, palms up, and the wand tumbles into the dirt.

"I didn't want to do it!"

The house-elf scuttles forward and wraps her arms around him, burying her head in the hollow of his shoulder in a futile effort to absorb the worst of it. He is wailing, moonlit eyes fixed on the darkened citadel. "I didn't want to! Oh, Merlin-" over and over and over again, crying out to the only god he knew. _Fat lot of good Merlin will do,_ she thinks randomly, _asleep in a tree somewhere._

In the end, his voice simply gives out.

She sets about plucking fragments of leaves out of his hair, as though they are a couple of clabberts with nothing better to do than sit about grooming each other. He blinks and looked up at her, bewildered. To her vast relief, she sees a hint of brown in his eyes. Ebony, not obsidian. Human eyes.

The rawest of whispers- "I didn't want to."

"Of course you didn't. Why doesn't I help Master Severus finish up here?"

"...Supposed to do it myself."

"What the family doesn't know can't hurt them." He stares at her, his mouth slightly open. "Mippy is good at Circumspection. Mippy and Master Severus will put Skurry to rest together -"

He does cry, now- not 'like a little kid', but staring up at the moon like an old man who knows his chances are lost. Tears track pale lines through the mud on his face. She attends to this as well and only succeeds in making a mess of her pillowcase. "We can't put him to rest!" he says finally. "I burnt his head in the stove!"

Black humor catching her totally unawares, she covers her mouth with her hand. Naturally, he mistakes the gesture and stumbles into an explanation, still so unlike him that it makes her heart hurt. "The Curse was supposed to seal his mouth. Grandfather demonstrated it on Father." Her mind's eye presents her with the image of supercilious Mr. Snape, lips glued shut and eyes sparking like Catherine wheels, and she has to clap _both_ hands over her mouth to keep from shrieking with tactless laughter. "He said we were out of frogs to practice on, and cats' lips have the wrong shape... so he called in Skurry." His small face contorts in terrible self-deprecation, a hand darting up to his cheek. Wondering how she could have thought this funny, she reaches out to stop him and he modifies the gesture to brush away a lock of hair instead.

"I did it wrong," he says. "So wrong. It all flew off- his head- and stuff... and blood..." He looks up at her with a twisted smile. "So what? I've seen blood before."

"Skurry was your friend. It's different," she says, trying to be clinical. Her feet are numb. Perhaps it is the cold.

He looks at his knees. "Then I was sick. Grandfather was so disappointed... They were due in Wales in a few hours, and I thought if I fixed it quickly enough..." Hunching his shoulders, he flexes the wand between his hands until it threatens to snap. "Coward," he mutters. "Didn't want to be alone."

"But you wasn't quick enough?"

He looks up at her and smiles, a delicate crease of his upper lip, its effect spoiled somewhat by the fact that he's just lost a tooth- but still, she knows where he learned that 'smile'.

"Mother came in," he says, "and saw the mess."

_Bitch-witch_, she thinks. _Vampire_.

"Skurry can rest in two places at once," she says. "Skurry wouldn't mind."

"How do you know whether Skurry would mind?"

"Skurry was a sensible house-elf. He'd be most concerned with getting Master Severus into a bath, which Mippy will draw, since Skurry can't anymore."

More tears well, and she catches them on her fingers. _The feelings that made these, little theorist- are they Acids or Bases?_ Then he scoots away from her on all fours to retrieve his wand from beneath a bush. The smudges of dirt make his cheeks hollow, matching that weary, wary mouth and wet eyes, which he swipes at with an equally dirty fist.

"Right," he says, and gets to his feet.

An incantation, a seemingly desultory gesture and Skurry's shrouded form rises, rippling with false life. She watches in silence, having shed her own tears many hours before, but her master makes some sound through his teeth, a sort of stifled whine. His left hand winds white-knuckled in the robes beside his leg. She reaches to hold it and he shakes her off. "Don't touch me!"

Skurry's 'boat' falters. It dips. It takes a nosedive, snugly into the grave.

"Well. That was very nice," she says comfortably.

"Merlin's balls!" says Master Severus. He glares at the shroud's trailing hem, tears drying silver on his cheeks. "I'm not brave! I'm not brave, _Mippy!_"

Strangely comforting, hearing her name used as an expletive again. "I thinks you're brave," she says.

He closes his mouth and looked away.

Filling the grave proves easier- two sweeps and it is done. The moon is at its zenith, the air crystalline-cold. She wants her child inside, but still there is the issue of...

"Rocks," she says.

Master Severus blinks at her. "Rocks?"

"To keep scavengers out of the grave," she says bluntly, and regrets it a moment later, when his eyes go hollow.

"Oh," he said. She wrings her hands as he backs up against a nearby tree, the hollowness leeching away what little color he has left beneath the mask of mud. "Well. I don't think we can."

"Why not?"

"Because I can't summon them. I don't know where they are..."

"Then let's go back to the house," she says.

_"I'm not going back to the house!"_ he screams at her, quite suddenly, wrapping both arms around his thin torso as though to keep himself from flying apart. "I'm not going back, I'll stay here and keep watch, or else something will dig him up and make _bits_ of him, and Grandfather will make me look at them, and I _won't look!_ I'm finished looking! I'll just stay here and look at _dirt_, so LEAVE ME ALONE!"

He's trying to glare her into the ground, a trick that works on some of his cousins. She daintily skirts the edge of the mound to stand beside him, hooking a spindly finger into the pocket of his robe. "Mippy will stay and watch also," she says tranquilly.

"Occludostium," he says.

"What?"

He's staring off at an angle, frowning slightly. "Occludostium. One of Grandfather's wards. It seals doors and apertures. A grave has a 'mouth'..."

Mippy squeaks. "Master Severus has an idea!"

"Either that, or Master Severus is about to blast Skurry's leftovers into orbit." He pushes off from the tree, bits of lichen crumbling over his shoulders and onto her bald scalp. "Go stand on the lawn."

She obeys, feeling a bit quizzical, frosted grass crunching underfoot. Her master, a small black shadow surrounded by shadows, stands martially before the grave.

"Has you ever done this before?" she shouts.

"No!" he shouts back. "So stand back!"

She takes a quick step forward.

_"Occludostio!"_

A white light flashes. Her foot comes down.

They are both still here.

"Did it work?" she squeaks.

Holding the wand defensively out before him, Master Severus pokes at the mound of earth with his toe.

Then he treads on it.

Then he jumps on it.

Then he dances around in a little circle, chanting, "Yes I did it I did it I did it and-I-_didn't_-screw-up!"

The dance ends in a spin that fans out his hair and robes around him and almost topples him off the mound. He grins at her, eyes glittering fiercely through the dissipating cloud of white vapor around his face. Never mind his dancing on Skurry's grave- somehow she doesn't think Skurry would take offense.

"Master Severus will take his bath now," she says in a tone that brooks no argument.

Half the smile falls off his face; the other half hangs crookedly, uncertain of the joke.

"I have to clean the kitchen," he says. "And wash my clothes, and hide the footprints, and somehow hide this too..." He waves his hand at the bare mound of earth and surrounding chewed-up greenery.

"Mippy will help," she says.

His jaw drops. "You can't help. Grandfather said so."

"Mippy wants to help," she clarifies.

He seems to find it unfathomable. An hour ago, she would have herself.

"Grandfather will sack you!"

"The Old Man won't know."

"Of course he'll know! He's... he's..." He casts about for a metaphor strong enough. "He's like Albus Dumbledore!"

"The Old Man," Mippy smiles, "believes he is my master."

Master Severus closes his mouth.

And then he lets her take his hand and lead him back to the citadel. It is so extraordinary; he has to walk facing backward once or twice, to study their paired footprints wending across the grass.


	3. Chapter Three

Mippy runs a hot lavender bath in the guest-wing's only ghost-free bathroom, routes a few of the Old Man's own afghan-sized towels onto a chair by the tub, and goes to shoo her master into it. Of course he's in the kitchen, hunkered morosely before the cold stove's open door. He hasn't even removed his boots yet.

"Out of that!" she squeaks, flapping her arms like wings. "Mippy says get out of that and into the tub _right now!"_

Startled, he slams the door on his hair and stands up quickly. "_Ow!_ Merlin's-"

"Master Severus had better not say 'balls'," she warns him.

"I was going to say-" Rather unsubtly, he focuses on her enormous eyes. "Er, 'eyeballs'."

"Much better." A twiggy finger points imperiously. "Outer robe and boots."

He shudders, pulling the robe's loose cuffs down over his fists. "I'm cold," he says flatly, after a moment.

She bites her lip. "Just boots, then," she says, more gently. "And may Mippy brush you, so you doesn't get dirt on the rugs?"

With a barely perceptible nod, he sits down on the floor to unbutton his boots- always a very solemn procedure. She brushes him magically, trying not to touch him at all. A stubborn plaque of mud remains beneath the outer robe's collar. "You has mud in your collar," she says.

"I'm-not-a-complete-prawn-so-just-get-on-with-it-please."

It's still moist, home to two somnolent sowbugs and one bristling, deep-orange centipede. She crushes the centipede in her fingers, not wanting him to know what has been riding against his skin, and drops the sowbugs on the floor. Master Severus hunches his shoulders nervously. "What are you doing back there?"

"Wiping Mippy's hands," she says, wiping Mippy's hands. "You is very muddy."

"Can I get up now?"

_Good thing his father isn't here,_ she thinks._ Asking a house-elf for permission!_ A moment later, he realizes his mistake and stands up quickly. "When Master Severus comes downstairs again, Mippy will have dinner ready," she says to cover the moment.

"'Master Severus' will be too busy cleaning the kitchen to eat." He does his best to tower over her, though now his boots are off the top of her head comes up to his chest. Lowering her eyes in stifled amusement, she sees his socks don't match. _Skurry really_ was _skiving off,_ she thinks, startled. Her master looks down also and sees the socks: one black, one blue.

"My socks don't match!" he bursts out, standing on one foot to rip off the blue one. His bare foot touches the floor, still lightly streaked with Skurry's blood, and jerks up again. "Oh, Merlin, I stepped in it- I've been _sitting_ in it-" he yelps, and runs for the foot of the stairs.

Evidently, his tolerance has been reached.

"Mippy will clean the kitchen." She uses the soothing, singsong voice left over from early years of night terrors. "Master Severus will take his bath. Go on..."

He stands on the second step, clutching the boots and blue sock to his chest, and regards her unblinkingly. "Where will you be?"

"Mippy will be right here. Cleaning the kitchen," she adds, since he seems to be unclear on the concept.

"Until I'm done?"

"Until Master Severus is done."

"Where are the other house-elves?"

_Hiding from you,_ she thinks. "Working," she says.

"Will they sneak up on me?"

"Certainly not."

"Tell them not to." She nods. He relaxes a bit- enough to muster a faint scowl. "And don't look in the stove."

"Mippy will not look in the stove while Master Severus is bathing," she agrees.

"Or while I'm getting out of the bath."

"Or while you is getting out of the bath."

He peers at her suspiciously, wrinkling his nose. It makes him look like a nearsighted eagle. _Mr. Snape's son, despite_ her_ lies. What a family of barristers!_

"Mippy promises," she says, quite slowly and clearly, "not to open the stove _at all_ until you comes back, and then we will open it together."

Finally, he blinks, and turns to climb the stairs, holding a filthy boot in each hand. Flakes of mud drop onto the risers. She decides against mentioning it for fear of prompting another debate, or, worse, a complete collapse. It's only a little dirt. Instead, she shouts across the kitchen, "Call Mippy if the water gets too dirty!"

"I know how to drain a tub, _Mippy,_" he grumbles, crossing the landing.

His footsteps are utterly silent.

Children are supposed to thunder upstairs 'like a herd of elephants'._ A shame and a waste,_ she thinks sadly. _Maybe he's just tired..._ Maybe he'll be able to sleep for once, with his mother out of the house. She once heard him asking his paranoid aunt how to ward a room against Apparition.

Maybe she can stand guard.

Only after his footsteps have crossed overhead does she let herself begin, trying not to think about the _smell_- a thin, brownish sort of smell, like burnt leather and grief. She tries not to remember him sitting there beside the stove, legs folded awkwardly beneath him like a marionette with its strings clipped, where they had left him. Alone.

It's just a memory, one among so many.

She tackles the leaded glass cabinets first. It's strangely satisfying, working dried gore out of the hinges. Takes elbow grease, as Skurry would have said. _Just a mess, _she tells herself. Just blood and worse than blood in rivulets, pools and clots, soaking her master's robes and caught in her master's hair, a dark and viscous thread strung over his lips like some hideous scar.

It wouldn't wash away, of course. Memories never did.

Deprived of her dead friend's eyes, she found herself focusing, instead, on the eyes of this child- realizing, to her chagrin, that he _was_ still a child- and suddenly, she wished she had the nerve to become visible, so he would look back at her. So he'd look at something, anything, just to make sure his eyes and mind still worked.

He didn't look.

He started to cough, face buried against his knees. The cough turned into dry retching, with nothing left to bring up anymore, and when he finally lifted his head, sight and sense had returned. He clawed the false scar away from his mouth and pronounced a summoning charm. Milk and liquor bottles, jam jars, the tiny crystal confections that had held his mother's perfume- collection bottles, the tools of salvation- his trunk upstairs was full of them. The boy who couldn't catch a quaffle caught the bottles easily and arranged them according to size.

_"Obtempero,"_ he said quietly, tapping his wand against the floor. It made a tiny spattering sound, like one more droplet falling.

He raised his left hand and traced it across an invisible surface, as though smudging a chalk line with his thumb, and the fluid between flagstones stirred. It began, almost sheepishly, to retreat from him into the marbled puddles behind it. He opened his hand and drew something unseen toward him (the fabric of his lost mother's skirt? The fabric of reality?) The coalescing pool writhed, seemed to roll over- grew long, narrow and bright, leaving a colorless liquid in its wake- and, reminding her of the Old Man's pet snake, stretched itself out lazily on the stone floor. 

By age five, her master had become adept at calling water up out of drains, saliva from his sleeping father's mouth, and pumpkin juice out of the pitcher at breakfast, impressing his alchemist aunt, but few of the People Who Mattered. Now he coaxed with slight, repetitive gestures the colorless liquid into two streams. One, slower and less transparent, paused to examine bumps in the stone. The other eagerly climbed the recycled gin bottle. A moment later, the crimson snake crept up and into the milk bottle's mouth.

From pumpkin juice to blood...

Still, his face was tranquil.

Unheard by human ears, she thanked every god she'd heard of- and Merlin, for that matter- for collection bottles, while the other house-elves murmured in horror. They'd seen him do this before, of course, but never to one of their own.

Feathers from his grandfather's owl, the eyes and claws of his cousin's rabbit, ash from the pyres of his father's horses, even his pet niffler met eternity as the contents of pouches, bottles and jars. She remembered the look on his mother's face when she found him clipping locks of Erichtho's fur. It was wistful, verging on tender- until he exchanged the scissors for tweezers.

"What _are_ you doing, Severus?"

"Plucking eyelashes." It had been nearly a year since he'd last called her 'Mother'. He held his trophy up to the light, then dropped it into a small, silk bag made to hold calligraphy nibs.

"What next?" she sneered. "The poor thing's teeth?" 

"Whiskers, then teeth," he answered impassively.

"And then what?"

Her master looked up, ebony eyes meeting obsidian. "Why do you ask when it will only upset you?"

"I am not upset," she snapped. "I am angered by your lack of respect for the dead."

After a moment, he bowed his head low over the small, cold body, as his still-braided hair could not hide his face. "I respect Erichtho," he said, very softly.

She left him then, white teeth and white hands clenched.

Erichtho's eyelashes went into every one of his 'experiments' over the next few months, back at the small, gray house near Titchwell. Most of them simply fizzled; a few stank so badly that a specialist had to be called in; the last he set out in a sealed flask, warning Mippy not to touch it under pain, not of death, but "a fate so hideous as to beyond your limited imagination." Mippy, whose imagination wasn't at all limited, avoided his bedroom entirely.

On their next visit to his grandfather's, she caught him with a handful of test tubes in the breakfast room. He bore an eerie resemblance to his mother at that moment: black hair and pale skin, the sylph-like back (_a child's,_ she told herself) bowed over an uncle's absinthe glass. She watched in silence as he crept around the table, switching tubes from hand to hand over a palm-sized Chinese teacup and a glass soup dish. The bound end of the queue slipped off his shoulder and into the dish before he could catch it, drawing a hiss of irritation between his teeth. Mippy took a quick step backward. His head jerked up.

"Another dish," he snapped. "Quickly." She twisted the frayed hem of her pillowcase and thought of slavery, but he mistook her hesitation for a different kind of fear. _"Please?"_ he said, with ineffable sarcasm.

So, she brought it; he administered his poison with the surety of one who had done such things before; and she retreated to the kitchen, murmuring unheard pleas for mercy. The dish belonged to a feebleminded and frail elder cousin of his, who spent all her waking hours playing chess. Mippy thought he was fond of the girl. _Eliminate Personal Ties- _yet another step along the road to this untimely adulthood, along with his darkened eyes and whispering in the dead of night, when more wholesome children slept. 

Reacting with the copper basin, the milk-blue potion turned viscid lilac and slid reluctantly down the drain. Perhaps a silver spoon would cause the same reaction, easily visible through a thin broth? 

As the other house-elves bustled about her, preparing this and serving that, she began to wonder why she cared. 

It wasn't her place to get involved; she'd only earn more curses that way. And the sooner this family finished itself off, the better.

Even the crippled ones.

Even the children.

Barely five minutes later, her dismay gave way to blank surprise when the chess-playing cousin slid silently out of her chair- and on upward, like a Muggle's toy balloon.

"Egnatia, what _are_ you doing?" the girl's mother droned, dribbling clotted cream into her porridge. Her daughter hit the ceiling, mouth forming a surprised "o". She made a desultory effort to get down again, paddling her limbs, and then just floated. The "o" returned to its natural state: a pacific smile. As the alchemist aunt came up beside her, she took hold of a trailing, amethyst sleeve and in a stage whisper informed her, _"You too!"_ The alchemist aunt patted her gently. 

Master Severus didn't spare a glance for either of them. Hands clasped in front of his mouth, he was watching his uncle... who sipped absinthe and watched him back. Gradually the attention of the entire table turned to the absinthe-drinking uncle. He showed no signs of rising from his chair. Master Severus sighed.

"My Levitation Solution," he said when questioned, careful not to lisp in the gap from his front teeth. "Seriphion, distillation of elder pith, Aethonan ash, chalk, flying rowan cotyledons, niffler eyelashes, and I took hair from their combs-" a small finger pointed. "And his shaving brush." The earthbound uncle, already pleasantly inebriated, raised his glass in a general toast. "It's a signature potion, like polyjuice."

The alchemist aunt clapped her hands, bobbing gently against a stone corbel. "That's why it didn't work on Darwin," (who silently raised his glass again). "Common wormwood and seriphion don't mix."

The boy began to look crestfallen; the Old Man snorted. "Forget the seriphion. Who'd have thought of niffler eyelashes?"

Not caring about his teeth, for once, her master actually, honestly smiled.

"Next time," the Old Man growled, "you test it on me." And the boy positively _grinned._

Now, straightening out the kink in her back, she surveys the gleaming kitchen. There will be no more burials today. She doesn't pretend to understand humans, the games they play with their cauldrons and wands, but perhaps something may be done with what remains- some small cure, or flight of fancy. When her master returns, she will ask permission to place Skurry's skull amongst the delicate skulls of rats, and half-calcined Aethonan bones.

She doesn't think Skurry would mind.

He, too, had liked to see their master smile.


	4. Chapter Four

He doesn't want to get out of the bath.  
  
In the bath, he knows he's clean. If something seems to cling to his lips and slide over his skin like a gossamer hand, he may scrub at it until it goes away. The water, twice drained, begins to run cold, despite charms on the boiler (stupid Muggle contraption). He casts a gradual warming spell upon the water in which he sits, until it's as hot as he can stand and his submerged limbs turn lobster-red in stark contrast to sallow hands and spindly, spidery knees.  
  
The lavender-scented foam has long since given way to a slick froth over the surface. He feels a pang of shame at not having luxuriated.  
  
Eventually, the house-elf comes to find him.  
  
It isn't Skurry. He has a momentary vision of a headless body, skin shrunk close in death, tottering through the open door - but no, it isn't Skurry. It's Mippy, whom he hasn't killed yet, and she looks at him with strange dismay that makes him want to cry.  
  
"Isn't you clean yet?" she should say. She doesn't. Instead, she takes one of the towels and approaches him, obviously choosing her words. "Time to get out," she says.   
  
He pokes his toes out of the water, studying them. They look pickled, white and shriveled... A dead boy's toes. He could argue. He could tell her that when he closes his eyes, in the red darkness there, once again it all goes wrong and he feels it wet on his face and warm gobbets tumble into the too-loose neck of his robe-  
  
He opens his eyes wide and looks down. His own little-boy body (when _will_ he grow up?) glistens raw pink from an hour of scouring. One of his nipples seems to be bleeding. He touches it lightly, sticks his finger in his mouth. Blood, yes; but he feels it, the sting that makes blood happen, and that makes all the difference. It gives him, in fact, a peculiar satisfaction.   
  
Silently he stands up. The tub begins to drain and Mippy wraps the towel around him, tending him, as she hasn't done since his Dad decided he was too old to be coddled. Passively letting himself be dressed, he listens to her homely mutterings, looks down at her large blue eyes and imagines them gone, the stump of tongue blindly probing from a black and gaping throat. He wonders when he went mad, and then thinks maybe all grown-ups are like this. Has he grown up, at the tender age of nine?  
  
Mippy ties the dressing gown at his waist and pats him on the back, a gesture evidently meant to propel him toward the door. "Master Severus must eat," she says.  
  
His stomach lurches at the idea. "Master Severus isn't hungry."  
  
"Master Severus must still eat. How about a sandwich?"  
  
"There's nothing in this house I'd want in a sandwich."  
  
"Not even your Uncle Darwin's marmite?" she says coyly.  
  
He stands there looking at her, picturing the thinnish stuff that ran down Skurry's leg as he floated him carefully across the kitchen stoop. Politely he says, "No, thank you", they haggle a bit and eventually he finds himself munching a chocolate tea biscuit with a vague sense of unreality, as though the world has reversed itself. The house seems otherwise deserted. He knows the truth. They're hiding- from him. He's joined the ranks of the Dark.  
  
And one of them leads him downstairs now, brittle fingers linked with his... Doesn't she know he could kill her? Doesn't he know he could fling her small body over the banister, send Conterus after her, and not even the Ministry would punish him for this?  
  
"You're a bit dim, aren't you," he says through a chocolate mouthful.  
  
"Mr. Snape would say 'don't talk with your mouth full'," she says, turning her blue eye on him. "How is Mippy dim?"  
  
He blinks slowly at her, thinking of his father _(feel nothing, reveal nothing)._ "You don't see it. I'm bad," he says, matter-of-factly. The mere admission leaves him feeling somehow desolate.  
  
"You is not bad," she answers.  
  
"I'm a Dark wizard."  
  
They have reached the kitchen. A slight, acrid taint still hangs in the air. He wonders whether it is worth burning cinnamon, or whether this would lose him points in the future inspection. The stone floor gleams dully, eyelike chips of mica winking here and there; glass shines. The impressionistic splatter is gone from walls and cabinet doors.  
  
"Looks better," he says grudgingly. Mippy plants herself in front of him, hands on hips.  
  
"How can you possibly be a Dark wizard? You is only nine years old!"  
  
His brow furrows in a frown, the best he can do toward a glare of searing contempt. "Consuoris is a Dark curse."  
  
"Master Severus didn't cast it-"  
  
" 'Master Severus' ballsed up casting it, so 'Master Severus' is a bad Dark wizard!"  
  
"You will listen to Mippy," she says sternly, stumping over to the stove, and opens its door on cold ashes. "Stand up straight- and don't say 'ballsed', it isn't couth... Mippy has an idea." She turns around with the skull in her hand, and the world flip-flops again, though the taste of chocolate remains in his mouth. Random details make themselves known- seared flesh clinging to cheek and brow ridge, the withered cusp of an ear- and he holds the last biscuit tightly, hoping it will keep the world from flipping yet again into some still more terrifying version of itself. Mippy wraps Skurry's head in an old dishtowel. It seems so mundane, wrapping a head. He doesn't know whether to laugh hysterically, faint, or wait with apparent calm to receive it from her. He does the latter, and she beams up at him. "Mippy thought you might find it useful."  
  
"U-useful?" he echoes, with only the slightest hint of a stammer. The skull is dreadfully light in his hands. He tastes chocolate and bile.  
  
"Like niffler's whiskers," she says. "Like bones of flying horse."   
  
"I don't have a crucible large enough."  
  
Mippy's face falls. "Skurry always liked to be useful."  
  
_Useful._ He tries to reconcile the word with his image of a living Skurry, a Skurry who could like things, and sees instead his own hands, his wand, reducing the skull to manageable fragments _(Contero!)_, peeling away the cooked-hard flesh. It seems, then, the world does turn- slowly- and once it has settled he knows he will find a way. Everything has its uses...  
  
_Perhaps this is what Grandfather is always talking about._  
  
"Yes," he says rather blankly. "All right..." Points his wand at the stove's open door and casts Evanescus, emptying it of the reeking ash. Before he knows it, Mippy has taken his wand from him, which shows he isn't up to snuff. No one takes a wizard's wand- least of all a house-elf.  
  
"As for Master Severus being a Dark wizard," she says, poking him in the sternum with it, "Unicorns aren't bad."  
  
He snatches the wand back and glares down his reddened nose at her. "A single hair is not an endorsement."  
  
His father's words, less powerful since he can't muster his father's voice. Mr. Snape's in-laws were all been perplexed by Master Severus' wand pairing. As one of his cousins said, "Unicorn? How drippy!" Four months later, said 'drippy wand' removed said cousin's thumbs, vindicating both Mr. Snape and his son's supposedly Dark heart.  
  
 "You is only nine," she hisses. "You can't be a wizard at all until you finishes school. You is not Dark yet- and in two years, Master Severus will spend most of the year away from home."  
  
He stares at her blankly, seeing himself reflected in her eyes, a white boy-face with eyes like tunnels, revealing nothing, going nowhere.  
  
"Two years is a long time," he says.  
  
She takes his hand again, pulling gently, leading him back upstairs and to sleep. A tremor bespeaks her silent agreement.   
  
Two years is a very long time.


End file.
